Performative reading is good for literary culture

LARPing is as good an incentive as any

Pictured: The OG Infinite Jest cover as held by QUENTIN NGUYỄN-DUY.

There’s a hilarious sketch with the Wasian actor Quentin Nguyen-duy where he’s dueil-wielding an OG copy of DFW’s Infinite Jest and a matcha latte while he’s trying to pick up a woman outside a subway station in Manhattan.

One of the funniest things you can see in New York, of course, is the Men Who Are Reading in Public, that is to say, they are transparently “reading” a paper book as a bit—as a form of attention-seeking behaviour so that they can get laid. Aside from the charming guilelessness of youth, this is indeed an incredibly funny indictment of how post-literate our society is.

“But how do you know they’re doing it performatively, Han?”

Listen buddy, I wasn’t born yesterday, I’m not autistic, okay—the way you can tell if a man is reading performatively is purely by way of intuitive judgment. It’s not dissimilar to those guys on the subway who are listening to music and pretend-drumming while they’re bobbing they’re heads, as if to say—“hey, did you know I like MUSIC? I’m actually not like OTHER guys—I’m a MUSICIAN. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

There’s a million versions of this behavior in every society at every point in human history, and holding an OG copy of Infinite Jest is just the nth iteration of guys randomly doing pullups or pushups or calling attention to themselves with whatever the contemporary mating display dynamics happen to be.

Bret Easton Ellis has commented that paperbacks were once the original smartphones: a form of portable entertainment that people would bring with them everywhere to fill the space of dead time.

In the year 2026, the only apparent reason for a man to carry a paperback is to use it as as conversational prop to accompany a tote bag.

This is funny. We needn’t be critiquing this. It simply doesn’t matter at all.

Analog media are just one among many potential tools for status signalling (sexual or otherwise).

The traditional critique of signalling-motivated engagement with the arts is that it’s fundamentally corrosive to the underlying enterprise. If the primary motivation for engaging with literature is a sort of intellectual snobbishness or the desire to cultivate a surface-level aesthetic, then the content of the work seems obviously secondary to that. This is why Sam Kriss hates A24 movies for being thematically thin.¹

But if we interrogate this phenomenon further, we start to understand that status-seeking behaviour has always been integrated with the cultural production of art. You’re telling me guys like Hemingway and Mishima weren’t narcissists? You’re telling me these guys weren’t writing bangers partly because they wanted to get pussy and/or bussy? You think Lord Byron wasn’t trying to get his fuck on?

It’s never not been this way. The flame is eternal.

Art is unique in that even the most deranged, narcissistic, psychopathology-laden person is capable of creating narrative beauty. We’re not making spreadsheets here. We’re not fine-tuning large-language models. We can be a little bit chaotic. We can be a complete piece-of-shit human being, even. It’s not a character-test.

And that is because the artist is really just a conduit through which recombinant experience flows through the gate of consciousness and blooms into the vessel of a particular medium.

It’s fine, actually, if people engage with literary fiction partly (or even primarily) due to crass psychosexual or status-oriented reasons. Regardless of motivation, it still makes the number go up: the number of books, the number of readers, the number of people at literary parties in Manhattan, and so on. Who the fuck cares. When the number goes up, you open up the possibility for true greatness. Probability is your friend here. The more the merrier. Take the work seriously, not yourself.

1. Okay, that’s valid.